Some people say they don’t like history because it’s boring. Giles Milton has written a true-life thriller about one of the darkest periods in history. Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a fascinating account of the exploits of a band of colorful characters. Men and women...

We often think of philosophers as esoteric men with beards and robes who remain above the fray. But this is how we come to think of them only after they are gone and all that remains are their words. As Stephen Backhouse’s Kierkegaard: A Single Life...

Historical fiction can be tricky as it demands that the author accurately captures a particular period while crafting a dramatic story. A compelling murder mystery with the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as a backdrop and whiffs of analytical geometry are a tall order. Andrew Pessin’s...

The British were able to keep their codebreaking efforts at Bletchley Park secret for decades after the end of World War II. David Boyle’s Enigmas consists of three short, complimentary books that combine to give readers a brief but thorough look at the origins and...

In this book, author Joel Whitebook offers historian Salo Barron’s notion that if someone of Doctor Sigmund Freud’s stature wrote a book like Moses and Monotheism, there “must be something worth considering in it.” Freud: An Intellectual Biography is also something worth considering. Whitebook, who is...

Adam Smith: Life, Thought and Legacy is an expansive work about one of history’s most important thinkers and political economists. The 557 pages are divided into five sections and 32 chapters written by various contributing authors. The generous page count could have easily made this...

In another life, Max Weber could have been a lawyer. The man now called one of the “fathers of sociology” along with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx earned a doctorate in law from the University of Berlin in 1889. Soon after, however, he found his true passion...

The trim size, the coated stock, the jacketless cover, the layout of the text and illustrations, and the curriculum-style presentation of the material give Nucleus: A Trip into the Heart of Matter the look and feel of a textbook, albeit a very thin one, but...

Few historical figures are as engaging to ponder than Leonardo Da Vinci, the renowned Italian artist, engineer, architect, inventor, humanist, and all-around “Renaissance man” (Wray, 6). He was (and is) the model by which all other future artists have been judged—both in regards to his...

Ross King has published three engaging books, over the past sixteen years or so, that describe the creation of three of the best-known works of the Italian Renaissance: Florence’s Il Duomo (Brunelleschi’s Dome, 2000); the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling,...